[Vol. 71] Dog Days
Why chasing your own tail isn't half bad.
Welcome back to That’s Gay 🌈 A biweekly newsletter for all the folks outgrowing "the way things are" – written by a queer kid who knows the feeling.
Candid, current, chaotic, and always tongue-in-cheek.
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Hello and welcome back to That’s Gay, my friends. Happy Tuesday.
I realize I skipped a newsletter last Friday – I was trying to write a poem that day and my brain decided to do absolutely zero of the heavy lifting required (other then, you know, running my body subconsciously … thanks for keeping that up, buddy 🧠 ).
Anyways, here I am now. It’s been a week, and while I am still poem-less, I’m definitely in the mood to write.
Apparently, the great Greek philosopher Socrates once uttered the words, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
And I’d agree with him; I’d agree with him enthusiastically, in fact.
To steal a phrase from this quote analysis I randomly clicked on, Socrates’ famous evaluation of life’s worth is meant to warn people against living a “mechanical life with an unthinking routine”.
I’ve always preferred to call it sleepwalking – toma-to, toma-toe, I guess.
I’m sure we’ve all been guilty of sleepwalking at some point. You wake up, you do what you’re supposed to do for the day, and you go to sleep. Life is still moving fast as ever – you still have a jam-packed day and weekend plans and a vacation coming up – but you’re just kind of moving with it; moving with the tide, wherever it may take you, never correcting course.
For years, nothing has terrified me more.
Everyone has an achilles heel. For some, it’s snakes. For others, it’s dying alone. For me, it’s sleepwalking – or, at least it was. Thoughts of wasting my high school years, my college years, and then my early twenties haunted me one after the other like a street on Halloween with candy bowl after candy bowl filled with nothing but “alternative sweets” (AKA a bunch of goddamn apples).
I guess I just couldn’t stomach the thought of regretting my youth. And because I failed to recognize an irrational fear when it stared my right in-between the eyes, I decided the only way I was ever going to circumnavigate my otherwise-definite fate was to live one very examined life.
Like very very examined. Like Horton from Horton Hear’s a Who! - picking-through-an-endless-field-of-identical-flowers examined (who, by the way, is the one philosopher I truly trust).
I think we can all guess where this goes from here, so let me sum up what I learned from my one very examined life with one very simple phrase.
Breathing, when you think about it too hard, becomes a chore.
When you’re living as you do 99.9% of the time, your breath is subconscious; easy (hopefully). It’s only once you put it under a microscope that the rhythm of the rise and fall of your chest starts to bother you.
*Apologies to everyone I just triggered with that last line. I’ll give you a second or two to question how it is you normally breath.
We all good?
Nice.
Enter Michel De Montaigne.
A man who Wikipedia once called “one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance”, De Montaigne was a Socrates challenger (and famed skeptic in general).
In his work Les Essais (translated to “Essays” in English), Montaigne writes, “Ce n’est pas à qui mettra dedans, mais à qui fera les plus belles courses”.
… Right, did we forget he was French?
To steal a line from the brainy folks over at Stanford, what Montainge is trying to say here is that “… what counts is not the fact that we eventually know the truth or not, but rather the way in which we seek it.” *
*This isn’t a translation, just an interpretation by said brainy folks.
It seems Montaigne believed strongly that “the truth” is unattainable.
So I’d imagine that to him, seeing me spending a good deal of the past few years examining, searching for, and obsessing over “my truth” must’ve looked a lot like a dog chasing its own tail.
I will never give up my relentlessly stubborn pursuit to be the most me version of me I can possibly be – and I’d never advocate for you to give in either.
But maybe Montaigne and the dogs had it right all along: the fun in chasing your own tail isn’t ruined by the fact that it’s elusive to you. For a brief moment, you’re spinning, jumping, breathing. That’s the fun.
I want to focus more on that part – and, in doing so, I trust I’ll get to where I want to go. Just something to think about.
Have a good week, dear friends.
Find me on Instagram: @till_kaeslin
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See you in Volume 72, folks!
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